Increase Team Productivity with Missions for Slack and Box

Summary

Robots and Pencils is a digital innovation agency that helps companies transform their business through innovative use of mobile, web, and frontier technologies. Their approach to solution design is rooted in the belief that, in the age of unprecedented technology acceleration, maintaining a competitive advantage requires new strategies and a focus on innovation.

The Robots and Pencils team did not only create client solutions, but they also created products. By leveraging two best-of-breed cloud technologies, Box and Slack, the company created a new custom workflow tool. Missions for Slack helps teams cut down on the time, energy and brainpower used to coordinate and follow up on routine processes.

Challenge

For busy project teams, managing routine processes and task can be time consuming and disruptive. Team members spent an inordinate amount of time and energy following up on process steps, such as approvals or updates, and coordinating tasks. Not only does this slow down individual productivity, but it distracts team members from their core focus, which impacts the speed and agility of the team as a whole.

Compounding this challenge, many processes involve documents that must be tracked and managed in an efficient and sustainable way. It’s far too easy for details to be overlooked and documents to be filed incorrectly, lost, or buried on someone’s laptop.

Solution

To help project teams work smarter and faster, Robots and Pencils developed a solution that leverages one of today’s top team collaboration tools combined with a powerful enterprise content management back-end. Missions for Slack uses the Slack platform to facilitate process communications and tasks and the Box platform to store and manage project documents.

Missions for Slack allows teams to create automated, custom workflows directly in Slack, where the team already uses for communications. It is a messaging-based workflow system that helps to alleviate the day-to-day administrative burden of coordinating processes and tasks. The solution allows anyone to create end-to-end, custom workflows for an unlimited number of processes. Completely customizable, workflows can be as simple or complex as needed — no coding required. The solution’s integration with Box means that team members can share, edit, and save files to Box without leaving their Slack workflow, and track progress in real-time.

A common use case is the document approval process. With Missions for Slack, an organization can create a customized workflow that involves any number of teams. The process is triggered when a Box document is added to a Slack channel.

In the above example, a member of the sales team uploads a draft SOW document to the #legal-sow-review Slack channel. With the Box integration, the SOW will also automatically upload to the appropriate Box folder. Once uploaded, Missions for Slack will notify the sales person that the SOW is in Box and provide a link to the document. It will also prompt the person to complete additional details that are required by the legal team directly in Slack. Missions will then notify the #legal Slack channel that a new SOW has been created and is waiting for a review. A legal team member will be asked to claim it.

Once claimed, the legal team reviewer can access the SOW in Box from the link provided in Slack by Missions and edit or comment accordingly. The reviewer can then either approve or reject the submission, providing feedback to the original submitter.

With Missions for Slack, routine processes like document approval become automated and fast, keeping each team’s work flowing with minimal disruption. This way, multiple teams across the organization can work smarter, together.